I can't imagine how hard it would be to tell family and friends you no longer believe after having your testimony, faith-promoting letters, missionary photos, etc. plastered across Facebook where your family, neighbors and friends have raved over them. This is exactly what my family/friends are doing with everything their missionaries send home.

If one of these kids decides to leave they will now face a publicly documented trail of their own faithful words and actions as well as their loved one's pride in them. The church is just ramping up the social pressure to a whole new level.

Yes, but I think they're doing themselves more harm than good. It's one thing for a free-thinking teenager to realize the fraud of kolobianism and choose not to go on a mission. Those kids are marginalized and 'explained away.'

However, when one of their trophy kids graduates seminary, goes on a mission, holds leadership roles, AND THEN discovers the fraud and leaves the church, the effect can be devastating on the family/friends who were rooting for them the whole time.

The things that missionaries write home are all written under pressure. They are like letters written by POWs in Viet Nam denouncing the U.S. The missionaries might not have a gun pointed at their head as they write home, but they figuratively do.

For a missionary that comes home and decides to leave, they can use all the FB postings by relatives as evidence of why they left. The mission orders them to ONLY write about good things and things that are faith-promoting and uplifting.

Don't write home about the bad things, as that will only worry your family. Don't tell them you are sick (literally). Don't tell them about the time you were held up at knife point. Don't tell them how you are warned not to go to certain areas because they are not safe (right next to where they live). Don't tell them about the cockroaches and bed bugs in your apartment. (Heard all of these and more from a TBM relative after they returned. The thing is, they still belong.)

Where I live, in the middle of the Morridor, local high school kids have put together a video collage of themselves opening their mission calls. I perceive a great deal of social pressure now for young men to apply for a mission as they approach their 18th birthday.

I had to politely ask a still-TBM former mission companion to stop tagging me in Facebook photos. I'm publicly atheist, and I find those photos to be both humiliating and painful. I told him I was trying very hard to put that nonsense behind me and his repeated tagging made that more difficult. He was gracious and immediately stopped.

It's also pressure for the parents to get their kids to go and remain faithful. It's the mormon equivalent to "my kids an honor student at ____".

What do these parent's do when their kid leaves the church? Are they resentful of their child because he or she has knocked them down a peg on the great mormon parenting scale? Do they feel humiliated after making such a show?

My mom is embarrassed of me because I left the church even though only her closest friends know. She didn't blab about all my callings publicly to hundreds of online connections. But still, my callings were status symbols of the role she dedicated a life to, "the good mormon mother" and when I left she felt shamed. Our relationship is still strained because of it.

So, to preserve your indignation, people shouldn't share anything about their beliefs?

Give me a break, anyone shallow enough to use postings on facebook to guide their faith is too shallow to come to a valid conclusion about anything, let alone leave a church.

No, my indignation isn't because of sharing, it is because this program is a lie at the expense of the naive.

TSCC created a program framed under the guise of missionary work when in reality it is a cult control tactic. (How many discussions have we had about how ineffective online proselyting will be with google at the fingertips?)